


Try a Little Tenderness

by dreadwulf



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Emotional idiots, Extends through canon to post ADWD, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Missing Scene, Revealing your deepest secret and then passing out cold as flirting, Traumatic Bonding, Warrior Dummies Who Can't Words, acts of service, book canon, canon continuance, this absolutely should not have worked and yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-07
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:40:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25777537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreadwulf/pseuds/dreadwulf
Summary: After The Kingslayer collapses in the baths at Harrenhal, Brienne has to wash and dress him for dinner with Lord Bolton. She is in no way suited to this task, but she does her best to care for him until he’s back on his feet. Perhaps one day he can return the favor.
Relationships: Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth
Comments: 125
Kudos: 452
Collections: Jaime x Brienne Fic Exchange 2020





	1. Harrenhal

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aliveanddrunkonsunlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aliveanddrunkonsunlight/gifts).



> Copious thanks to [tarthiana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarthiana/pseuds/tarthiana) for her helpful input and many corrections to my punctuation. 
> 
> Some of the dialogue in this chapter is mine, and some of it comes directly from A Storm of Swords.

**_“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’ - that’s intimacy.”_ **

**(Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)**

* * *

The air in the bathhouse is humid and hazy, a little bit dreamlike, and what follows feels very much like a dream.

Brienne sees that he is going to pass out a moment before he collapses, and scrambles closer to him with the slick floor unstable under her feet, leaving her towel forgotten behind her. When the Kingslayer pulls himself out of the bath he jerks oddly, something in his movements strained and off-balance. Then he falls limply into her arms.

Brienne calls out for help reflexively. “Guards! The Kingslayer!”

He moves without resistance then, heavy against her. She drags him a little way from the  
edge of the bath and lowers him slowly onto his back, his skin wet and slippery under her hands.

For the moment, in her concern, she has forgotten that she is naked herself, with water beading on her own skin. It drips unchecked from her body to his; it forms one surface across the places she is touching him.

She checks that he’s still breathing, her hand floating over his nose and mouth to pick up the shallow flutter of air. Breathing, but passed out cold on the damp floor, completely still, his mutilated arm limp at his side. For the first time since they cut off his hand, his face isn’t twisted up with pain. The Kingslayer actually looks peaceful.

When the guards arrive they grasp him by the shoulders and shake him roughly, and she wants to push them away, tell them to let him sleep. Except he isn’t asleep, something is terribly wrong, and surely he has never been this quiet and still in his life, even asleep he is always fidgeting and complaining. Brienne has slept at his side for weeks, and she knows.

She stands over him, watching closely. He has long and delicate eyelashes, she has come to know them well from riding strapped together on the horse. She spent hours looking down at his pretty eyelashes while he dozed against her half mindless with pain. When his lashes flutter now she sighs with relief, for she still needs to deliver him to King’s Landing to keep her oath to Lady Catelyn. But his eyes behind them are glassy and unseeing, and he does not rise.

The maester arrives, an older man with a disconcerting gaze named Qyburn. When he bends over the Kingslayer on the floor he tuts with concern. “I cautioned him to take the milk of the poppy. Young men never listen.”

Then she notices the guards’ eyes sliding over her bare skin, and Brienne remembers abruptly that she is naked. She hurries away to wrap a towel around herself while Qyburn completes his inspection. The towel is hardly helpful, too small, covering only a thin strip of her between her breasts and the tops of her legs, and barely that. She has to cross her arms over her flat chest to keep it from sliding off.

This Qyburn has no appraising glances for the parts of her not concealed. Brienne does not deceive herself that she has any kind of womanly allure, but she has the eerie feeling that the only flesh the maester is interested in would be on a surgery table before him.

“He fainted,” she informs Qyburn unnecessarily, and feels foolish. Obviously.

“The heat of the tubs will do it,” Qyburn says with clinical detachment, straightening. “There’s still poison in his blood as well, and he’s malnourished.”

Of course he is; even before the Bloody Mummers took them, the Kingslayer had been a prisoner of the Starks for nearly a year. It has not occurred to her before this moment that the Starks could have mistreated him, but she can see now how rail-thin he has grown, and that did not happen in a few weeks.

Brienne would not have noticed that earlier in their journey. She had disdained to give the Kingslayer any more attention than necessary, when he was her prisoner. And anytime she did look on him, when she absolutely had to, he would always be looking back, insolent and sharp and disconcertingly handsome, and she would have to avert her eyes.

When she had held him naked in her arms moments ago, he had been all sallow skin and bones. Not that she would know what a healthy man would feel like, to compare. She has never held any man like that before, much less a nude one. If she were not so concerned for his state she would have blushed wildly to be touching a naked man.

Qyburn shakes his head beside her, repeating to the guards that they must go before the lord of the Dreadfort, conscious or no. “Scrub him and dress him and carry him to Kingspyre, if need be. Lord Bolton insists he will sup with him tonight. The time is growing short.”

Dinner? Is he joking? But the strange man seems unlikely to joke. Brienne grimaces and looks down at the Kingslayer. He cannot go before Lord Bolton like this.

He has barely begun to scrub in the bath and is still filthy. Everywhere his skin is caked with mud and blood and worse. But he hasn’t the strength to climb back into the tubs, and the heat would most likely make him swoon again. Qyburn and some of the guards try to force the Kingslayer to his feet, but even sitting up seems to make him violently dizzy, and he slumps from their grasp. No, he will not make it back into the baths, and someone will have to wash him.

But who? Surely there are attendants for this. She should let the maester call for them. They are suited to the task, maidenly and gentle. They bathe people all the time, people of all kinds. Someone like Brienne has no business conducting such duties.

But, she considers, if it were her laying barely conscious on the ground, wounded, in a strange place, she would not want any stranger bathing her, not even a female attendant. Surely he will not want these guards, or this Qyburn fellow, scrubbing him down hastily like a horse. He probably doesn’t want her either, but she will have to do.

Brienne sighs. “Bring me clean garb for him. I’ll see that he is washed and dressed.”

The guards seem disgusted to have to touch the Kingslayer, but they cannot leave him lying in the middle of the floor. They take him up under each arm and haul him to a stone bench nearby, dropping him onto it ungently. He lets out a pained hiss at the impact, his eyes squeezed shut.

“Fill those buckets and you can go,” Brienne instructs their guards, who are apparently only too happy to leave her to it. They fill three buckets and set them beside the bench, and then the men withdraw from the room and the two of them are left alone together.

Her despised companion sits hunched forward on the bench, his face turned away. The Kingslayer, emblem of everything that disgusts and frustrates her, who has more glory and accolades than she ever will despite his dishonorable reputation. She has wished more than once for his disagreeable company, with its endless taunts and disdainful looks, to cease. For their journey to come to an end. To be free of him.

Yet somehow they have become allies. Their imprisonment forced that. Even after all of the dueling they had done in words and with blades to that point, they had to come to each other’s aid as prisoners of the Bloody Mummers, very much to her surprise. She is still reeling at the way he had fended off the bandits from their plans to rape her. Lying to them, commanding them to leave her be until they had cut off his right hand in retaliation. Even after that, when he sat twisted in agony, he had shouted “sapphires” to keep them off her. This he had done for someone who had so recently been his own captor. The Kingslayer had done nothing but insult her all across the Riverlands, and then he had protected her virtue. Perhaps it had been some sort of knightly chivalry? But she would not have credited him with any sense of honor at all, and anyway she is no maiden for rescue.

She still does not understand it. He is a mystery to her. Even more so after what he has just told her, only minutes ago, before he had fainted dead away. His anguished words are still echoing in her ears, and she has not yet decided what to make of them.

Brienne kneels before the Kingslayer, between his legs. If he were more alert, no doubt he would have any number of rude things to say about that. He is after all naked, and she wears only a too-small towel. But he is only barely awake, and too weak to pull away from her, and with his eyes shut he cannot see her cheeks reddening.

Even filthy, he is still beautiful. She has tried not to notice it all along, but out of his rags and exposed before her, she can no longer deny it. He is indeed much starved and what must have once been the sleek muscle of his limbs has withered away. But even so, he is perfect; his skin smooth under the dirt, the shape of his profile even more pleasing in its angle. A truly talented hand could carve him from marble, even now, and be called an unparalleled genius.

Brienne takes up soap and a bucket. Surely the gods are laughing at her, setting one such as her before such beauty. _Please Seven, let him not open his eyes just now._

With a stiff brush she begins to scrub him. She is brusque, methodical. First one leg and then another. At first she touches him only with the brush, but eventually she has to move him, maneuver him, hold him in place. He is too weak to move himself, and it will be faster this way.

For both of them, the sooner this is over, the better.

She washes his calves and his feet, straightening his leg each time to scrub away the pus from the blisters on the soles of each foot. Then, with a firm grimace and a fierce determination not to notice anything more than she has to, she washes his thighs, and very briefly between them (he will have to cope with an inadequate cleaning for his most private parts). She pours a bucket of water over him after that, and the water drains away blackened with grime. She clamors onto the stone bench after that to scrub at his back.

This is more difficult. Sitting beside him, much nearer to his face, it is harder to ignore just who she is handling so intimately. From the floor she had stopped herself looking directly at his face, and now she cannot avoid it.

The Kingslayer looks not at all the man she had met in a cage weeks ago, all arrogance and cleverness, with his laughing eyes and sharp tongue. Now he is simply tired and weak and sick. Misery is etched tightly onto his haggard face, into the dark hollows beneath his eyes, his clenched jaw. He is plainly trying to keep hold of himself, hold still. But he lists slightly to one side and another, like a sailor aboard a ship, as though the room is spinning about him.

She grasps him by one shoulder to steady him with her arm. His brow smooths a little at that.

For a time she just waits there. Letting him rest against her.

Of course she has been his caretaker more often than not, since they took his hand. Helping him on and off the horse, cleaning him, changing his bandage. It had not been pity or kindness on her part, doing these things. She took on the task as a matter of duty, and because the Bloody Mummers certainly would not have helped him. In truth she had resented it a little. It certainly had not softened her towards him. It is only his body she is responsible for - the promise she had made to Lady Catelyn had been a most sacred vow, and she intends to keep it even now.

But now his words play over again in her mind, the shocking tale he had told her in the bath. One she knows for truth; the man is too proud and too vain to weep for anything less. He told her he had killed the Mad King to prevent him burning down the city with wildfire. It had been an agonizing memory for him, and he had passed out as much to escape it as from the heat of the baths, she thinks now.

She had not remembered how young he had been at the time - when he killed the king, he had been years younger than she is now. Only a boy, sincere, serious, wanting to help. She can picture the young knight now, hear him still in the man’s voice. How he had admired them all, his fellow knights, and their sacred duty. How he had agonized over doing the right thing. That boy, this other Jaime Lannister, is someone she can understand, in a way the present Jaime Lannister is not.

Why did he tell it to her? Her of all people? So many years have passed since the King’s murder -- since his death. All the realm tells a very different story of him, and he has not hurried to correct them. Why would he conceal it for so long, and why tell it now?

She has a hundred questions burning on her tongue, but he cannot answer them now. She has to just think them, all together in a big jumble, while she sits beside the Kingslayer on a stone bench with her arm around his shoulders. The only sound in the room is his labored breathing, and the quiet splashes of water around them. Outside, beyond the doors, the distant murmuring of voices reminds them perpetually that they are still captives, and still in grave danger.

When he seems more relaxed, she takes up the brush again and scrubs his back, holding him up with her other arm. For his chest she does the reverse, putting an arm around his back to hold him up as she washes his torso --

\-- and here she blushes most furiously, with her face right next to his, as she scrubs along the muscles of his upper body down to the flat plain of his abdomen, and determinedly ignores anything down below that, where it is increasingly clear that the man has not been touched in more than a year and any stimulation at this point will have…certain effects... --

And then that is done and she washes his arms -- first the undamaged one, lifting it into her lap and soaping it from shoulder to finger. His hand she spends some time on. Holding it steady with her palm while scrubbing it with the brush, rubbing between his fingers, under the beds of his fingernails. He has only the one hand, and she can at least get it clean.

The other arm she is more careful with. Moving it at all seems to pain him. He winces when she touches it, and his breath saws in and out quickly. Brienne puts the stiff brush down. Using only her fingers, she rubs in soapy circles at his shoulder, and his upper arm, and whenever his body stiffens she goes still and waits for him to relax again. In this way, gradually, she works her way to the bandage and begins to unravel it. She will not need to clean his wound, as Qyburn was quite clear that he has only just scoured it. But the bandage is already bloody and dirty from the bathwater and he will need a new one.

This he protests at, weakly. He makes a feeble kind of attempt to free himself, grunting wordlessly as he tries to pull away. She holds him fast by the shoulder.

“It has to be changed,” she tells him. Her stern tone softens a little after that. “I’m sorry. I’ll be quick.”

He slumps again in place after that, perhaps resigned to his fate.

They have brought her a new strip of linen with his clothes, and she winds it around the stump of his arm as she has done several times before in their journey. Though she tries hard to be gentle, he flinches far more this time, squirming in discomfort. Whatever that strange man Qyburn has done, it has left him worse off than before. She is glad, now, that she sent him away.

Brienne ties off the bandage wincing in sympathy at the swollen end of his arm. Now she can leave his wound alone for a little while before she has to dress him. It makes her a little sick to her stomach, causing Jaime pain. He has suffered enough already.

His face she rubs lightly with a towel, instructing him to keep his eyes shut. Then she rubs soap onto her hands and spreads it through his filthy hair, raking her fingers across his scalp until his shorn hair slicks back away from his face. Then she takes the second bucket and dumps it over him again, taking care to hold his maimed hand well away.

Jaime scowls at her for that, and with his shaggy hair plastered to his face he looks a little like a drowned rat. She has a wild urge to laugh at his glowering expression. But she stays to her task unsmilingly. It takes another bucket of water to sluice the mud away and reveal his golden curls so that they shine dimly in the torchlight. Much better, she thinks with some satisfaction, while he sputters.

One of the guards has given her a razor, so that she might use it to trim his beard. She returns to kneeling before him, taking his chin in one hand. “Hold still,” she tells him.

Brienne has never done this before either. By all the gods, let her not inadvertently slice his throat.

Jaime looks at her dully now, his eyes slitted. The mossy green of his eyes are opaque; whether he feels disgust or shame or something else at how intimately she touches him, she cannot tell. She tries to ignore him, and concentrates on the razor and keeping her hands steady. She always does well with blades, whether knives or swords, but this is different, and she will be cautious.

It takes much longer than it should; she is so careful not to cut him. She runs the razor slowly through the ragged edges of his beard and lifts away the hairs until he is not quite so shaggy. He seems to approve of her progress, lifting his chin so that she can better access his neck. She leaves much of the growth around his chin, and shaves as close as she dares along his throat. She’s not sure what he would want, but she thinks he will look best with a short beard and some neatening along the edges.

He would never have allowed this had he not been so ill, of course. She is a little surprised he is tolerating it now, when he is coming back to himself more and more. Some part of her still anticipates that he will laugh in her face for daring to attempt something so nurturing. Surely no one would choose her -- clumsy, oafish, sullen Brienne -- to care for them.

When she is finished, he slowly lifts his hand and rubs at his chin lightly, inspecting her work. He has no clever commentary on her inept performance, as he might have if he were well. Instead his hand falls back to his side, and he sighs.

“You didn’t say,” he says softly.

Her eyes widen. This from him is a tone she has not heard before. She hadn’t known Jaime had any softness in him. He is all angles, sharp and quick and haughty.

He tilts his chin down to look upon her, still kneeling at his feet, and his voice takes a bitter edge. “Kingslayer or Savior? What is the verdict?”

She blinks back at him, startled, still holding the razor. He claimed Lord Eddard Stark had no right to judge him, yet he asks for her opinion. Surely it is not her place. She nearly says so, but something in his face stops her. Something about his nakedness. He is unguarded, and he is handing her a weapon. Refusing to answer him now would be cowardly.

She would not have cared yesterday. Before now he has been only a symbol to her - or a task she must complete. An example of everything wrong with the world. A representative of every man who has been cruel to her.

Now, after tending to his body, he has become a person.

“I--” Brienne trails off. She doesn’t know what she thinks. To kill one’s liege lord is the highest offense there is, short of kinslaying. But they had called him the Mad King for a reason, hadn’t they? No one she has ever met recalls him fondly. Jaime told her the king would have burned the city, taken all of the innocent civilians of King’s Landing with him. An unthinkable act, one that perhaps only another unthinkable act could prevent.

To serve the Mad King and observe the things he described could not have been easy. It shook her deeply, his tale. The kings and princes and knights in it were not like in the songs she knew -- the ones where all knights are gallant, all maids are beautiful, and the sun is always shining. But the honorable lords she has met so far have been cruel, and the greatest kindness she has ever known was done for her by the least gallant knight she can imagine.

“I don’t know,” she says aloud, hesitantly. “I cannot imagine breaking a sacred oath. To lose one’s honor would be worse than death, and no punishment could compare to it. But to save innocents is surely the highest duty of any knight, and if that conflicts with one’s oaths…I cannot truly know what I would do in such circumstances. I confess I am glad that I was not called on to make that choice.”

There. It is not an answer to his question, but it is honest.

The change in his expression is barely perceptible, but after staring at his face for so long tonight, she can see it. The tension eases away. His jaw loosens, and his lips part, and the lines of strain around his eyes relax. Somehow she had said exactly what he needed to hear, and it has eased some burden in him.

She has never been what someone needs before.

His green eyes are soft too, just then, liquid and pretty. He holds her gaze for a long beat, looking down at her, and surely she has never stared into a man’s eyes so long. When he looks on her like this, there is nothing else in the world but his eyes, looking.

Her heart beats faster, and she feels the heat of the baths suffusing her body as surely as if she had climbed back into a tub.

Brienne turns away quite abruptly. “You must be dressed,” she says, fetching the clean clothes that have been provided them. She takes longer than strictly necessary to sort through the small pile, while she recovers her composure, before turning back to him.

He is able to help her with the shirt when she brings it to him, guiding his bandaged arm first through the sleeves of the tunic. But she has to help him stand and balance him there while he pulls up his trousers, and soon after he has to sit down again. He is still weak.

“Now all I need is a silver looking glass,” Jaime murmurs, and he must be coming back to himself if he is making jests, however weakly.

Only then does Brienne clothe herself, cringing as she does it. The pink dress they have brought her is awful, too small, and she looks like an overstuffed sausage in it. But there is no time to fret over it, and she has no expectation anyway that her appearance will be pleasing, regardless of the clothes she wears.

She feels his eyes on her as she tugs on the ridiculous neckline. Now clean and dressed, and looking a good deal more awake, Jaime is getting a familiar glint in his eye, and she steels herself to hear the insult that is surely forming there. But whatever it is, he keeps it quiet. He is not completely recovered, or probably wearing the dress is humiliating enough to make insults unnecessary.

At least they are both dressed when the maester returns, and she must have done a passable job, as he nods in approval.

Qyburn holds out a new concoction in a glass, something decidedly unappetizing to look at. “You must not swoon before Lord Bolton. He is a busy man. Drink this.”

Jaime resists the Maester’s medicine. “Bring me the potion that grows new hands,” he snaps at Qyburn, not a little childishly, “that’s one I want.”

“Drink it,” Brienne tells him, with a hand to his shoulder. Strangely, he obeys her, without hesitation, and finishes it all. Though he makes a face at the wretched taste.

The Maester calls for the guards to carry him, and Jaime waves them away. He rises slowly to his feet.

“I can still walk,” he insists, asking Brienne for her arm.

She thinks neither of them are all that sure that he can. For the first few steps it seems as though he will sink back down to the ground. He drags his feet, staggers. He leans heavily on her, and she has to steer him to keep him from walking them into a wall. But clearly he would prefer this to having the guards carry him out, and slowly but steadily they progress towards the Kingspyre. For once she is grateful for her muscular arms, which allow her to hold him up.

The courtyards of Harrenhal seem endless. By the time they reach Lord Bolton’s dining hall both of them are exhausted. They endure a tense greeting with Lord Bolton before being lead to his table. Jaime drops into a chair and she reflexively takes the one to his right.

“Guarding my weak side?” he murmurs.

“Something like that,” she returns, in the same tone.

Brienne is examining the room, taking note of guards and exits, and which knives at the table look sharpest. She finds him staring at her then, examining her as though he has never really seen her before. There is a strange look on his face, his lips parted, as though he has just remembered something, or realized something. But he averts his eyes from her gaze. As the cupbearer pours the wine Jaime leans over as if arranging the tablecloth and says to her in an undertone :

“I can speak for the both of us.”

Just when “you” and “I” had become “us” is not clear, but it might have been there in the baths. There they had been naked before each other, and exchanged the only coin they had to offer. Him a secret, and Brienne her care. Thus exchanged, their alliance is sealed. It is a bond forged in the fires of suffering and fear and cruelty, and tempered by their dangerous decision to trust in one another.

Roose Bolton speaks mostly to Jaime, and he does most of the replying. When Lord Bolton calls him Kingslayer, she can see the faint twitch in his face, the twist of his lips. Somehow she had never noticed it before.

For her part, Brienne no longer calls him Kingslayer - not out loud nor in her thoughts, not ever again.


	2. King's Landing

**_being known is a mortifying ordeal not only bc it involves allowing someone to see the worst of you and hoping they will love you anyway but also bc it involves letting them see the best of you and hoping it actually means something to them_ **

_(kit-dot-com.tumblr.com)_

* * *

That night in the Harrenhal bathhouse is not often on his mind. In truth, Jaime does not much remember it.

It isn’t like sleeping, passing out. There is a transition to sleep, and usually there is dreaming. In the baths there had been neither. It wasn’t like going away inside either. When you go away, you are still at least somewhere. But this had been different: a vast blank space, blessedly empty. They were the first moments completely without pain since he lost his hand, and he didn’t even get to enjoy them. The pain returned when he did.

His stuttering consciousness did not retain much of the next candlemark. He had been on the floor with people looking at him, and then on a stone bench, and then he was being dressed and lead to Lord Bolton’s table. Even those bits are hazy and brief, like pictures in a storybook. Sometimes when he is nearly asleep, or just after waking, it comes back. More of a feeling than a memory. Something his body remembers, if his mind does not.

The clearest of the memories comes to him in the bath.

A far more pleasant environment, the baths at King’s Landing. The tubs are very fine, the air perfumed and sweet. They are curved precisely for one person, as wasteful as it is luxurious. When the water chills, one can ring a bell and have more hot water brought within minutes. But one also has privacy, and if one would prefer not to have servants gawking at the stump of his hand, one can keep the door shut and relax there alone.

Bathing remains an exercise in frustration. Jaime has become somewhat more adept at scrubbing himself left-handed by now, particularly with the help of a long-handled brush, but certain things are still beyond him. How a hand can wash itself, for example. He is trying to balance the cake of soap on the side of the tub and sort of rub his left hand against it, to get the back clean, and it isn’t working very well. The soap keeps sliding away.

He could ask for assistance. There are any number of servants who regularly bathe the Lords and Ladies of King’s Landing while they lay back and relax. But Jaime does not like to admit to how useless he has become, and so he spends an inordinate amount of time struggling to decipher how to do everything one-handed. Bathing is no different. So he sits alone in a tub wrestling with a bit of soap while the water cools around him.

By now he has weeks’ worth of dirt built up under his remaining fingernails and darkening his knuckles. Jaime squints at the dirt and then he remembers -- Brienne cleaned under his fingernails. That night in the bath. He was sitting half-awake on the stone bench, and she had washed him. He had briefly opened his eyes and seen her holding his hand in both of hers and carefully scrubbing it. He can see the gentle concentration on her face as she did it, her casual nakedness a match for his.

It is a strangely thoughtful gesture, and one that baffles him to think on. Surely to remove the grime of the road and the blood of his wounds sufficiently to please their captors had been her goal, but such a small detail could hardly make any difference to anyone. And yet she had done it. At Bolton’s table he had noticed it, his clean fingernails, without much thinking on how they had gotten that way. It had made him feel halfway human for the first time since Robb Stark took him captive.

He looks at his nails now, grimy and jagged. It makes him wonder what she had been thinking, that night. It was after he told her his story, after she had learned the truth of him. And then she had washed him clean.

Something about that catches in his throat.

He leans his head back against the edge of the tub and closes his eyes, his dilemma forgotten. He has very little memory after he had swooned in the tub, but he knows Brienne had been there all the while. Her presence he is certain of, even if there are only flashes of what she had done there, and a feeling he dimly remembers. A sense of warmth and… safekeeping, perhaps.

That had been the night they dined with Lord Bolton, and Jaime had been sent onward to King's Landing. No longer a prisoner, on his way home to Cersei. It had also been the night his right arm had stopped being an open wound and started to heal. And while he credits Qyburn with tending his wound, it is not Qyburn he pictures when he thinks of it. He just thinks of the bathhouse, the steam rising up from the stone floor, and peaceful surrender.

A little bit of that peaceful feeling comes back to him now, as he thinks upon it. He has only a slim thread of connection to the memory, but if he grasps for it now, he can find his way back to it. It is an unguarded sensation, one that uncovers him, leaves him more naked than naked. It is the kind of feeling that crawls into his chest and takes up residence in his lungs, so that it flavors the very air that he breathes.

This is a feeling he doesn’t know the word for, and a concept he would be unfamiliar with even if he did.

No, it had not been like sleeping, when he had fainted in the bath. It had been more like dying. He had almost expected to die there, while he was babbling about Aerys. Perhaps that was why he had done it. A last confession. Miraculous that he had gotten it all out - by the end of it he was ready for his heart to burst, his lungs to fill up with water. Once he had started speaking of it he had been racing against his own traitorous body to finish his tale. Only afterwards, to his surprise, he hadn’t died after all.

He has felt different since then. Lighter. A little of that burden lifted. Perhaps he had left some of it behind, there in the baths. Or perhaps Brienne had taken it from him. Perhaps she carries some of it for him now, out there somewhere, wherever she is.

Jaime has tried not to think back much on that journey he had taken with the maid of Tarth. They are delicate somehow, those remembrances. And he has the unspoken conviction that if he lingers too long on them he will soil them somehow.

He indulges it only briefly, and then his eyes open and he is in the bathing chamber in King’s Landing again, and alone. But of course he always bathes alone, but for that once.

Before he finishes with his bath he takes himself in hand, without questioning the urge. The demands of his body have little to do with the wanderings of his mind, he tells himself. He simply needs to do it, and chases that relief with brutal efficiency. His left hand is still awkward but it serves, and he hangs his right arm over the side of the tub and lays his head upon it and water splashes out of the tub and pools on the ground and the sound of it almost drowns out his gasping breaths as his pleasure descends on him like a sudden storm, and the water is all he can think of, the water and the steam and a hand more gentle than his own…

After, he banishes all of it from his mind. Dresses himself slowly, without aid, and takes his supper with Cersei and thinks of water and Brienne not at all, but he cannot help noticing as he eats the dirt still beneath his nails.


	3. The Riverlands

_**Oh she may be weary**_   
_**Them young girls they do get wearied** _   
_**Wearing that same old shaggy dress** _   
_**But when she gets weary** _   
_**Try a little tenderness** _

_**You know she’s waiting** _   
_**Just anticipating** _   
_**The thing that you’ll never possess** _   
_**But while she’s there waiting** _   
_**Without them try a little tenderness** _   
_**That’s all you got to do** _

_**It’s not just sentimental** _   
_**She has her grief and care** _   
_**But the soft words they are spoke so gentle** _   
_**It makes it easier to bear** _   
_**You won’t regret it** _   
_**Young girls they don’t forget it** _   
_**Love is their whole happiness** _

_**But it’s all so easy** _   
_**All you got to do is try** _   
_**Try a little tenderness** _

_\-- "Try a Little Tenderness" as sung by Otis Redding_

* * *

Brienne is burning with fever.

They are in a tavern. There is no time to stop, but Jaime insists.

She notices little of her surroundings now. Focuses on her next task, and then the next. She finds a place to sit, she nods when asked a question, and she watches the door anxiously across the mostly-empty barroom. This run-down alehouse does not get many visitors, but it is not strangers she is fearful of.

There will be people following them. The Brotherhood. They aren’t supposed to stop. 

“I’m ravenous,” Jaime had said, when he abruptly pulled his horse off the road and into the stables. Now, he sits staring at her across an uneven tavern table with a plate of food untouched before him. She is sure he is turning suspicious of her. That must be why he watches her so closely. She cannot bring herself to look back.

Through their ride her body has grown heavier and slower and her head feels stuffed with cotton, and even in the cold air she is sweating. Whatever is happening, she does not have time for it. She will push through this. She must.

"You're even more dour than usual," she hears Jaime grouse, and she can feel his eyes on her intently. "Will you eat, or have I wasted my coin?"

She makes herself eat. They will have to return to the road soon, and she must find the strength to continue. Brienne manages only small bites and a little watered-down wine to wash it down. 

"I should check on the horses," she says again, her eyes on the door.

"The horses have done nothing interesting in the quarter hour since you last checked, my lady.” Jaime manages to make even a polite address sound mocking; he says it in exactly the same way he used to call her a peasant wench. He leans back insolently and points a fork at her. “Remarkably inconsistent, this concern for your horse. I wonder, what became of the horse I gifted you with? I don't recognize the palfrey you've been riding."

She shifts uneasily. The longer they are here, the more Jaime begins to ask questions that she can't answer. Where exactly are they riding to? How long has the Hound had Sansa, and what does he want now? She will let him think her slow-witted if it will calm his suspicion.

“Do you want me to eat or not?” she answers dully, and his mouth closes on another quip. More questions crowd together behind his eyes as he watches her take another drink of wine, his eyebrows furrowed.

She shuts her eyes for only a moment, and when she opens them, Jaime is kneeling beside her chair, and she has upset her glass. Her hands are wet, and dark wine is dripping onto her lap. She is so clumsy sometimes. 

His hand is cool against her forehead. “My lady, you’re burning up.” 

It doesn’t sound funny this time. _My Lady._ It sounds as strange as it did the first time, when she came into his tent at the Lannister camp. She is too exhausted to ponder what that means. 

“I am fine, Ser,” she says slowly, clearing her throat and looking around for some distraction to draw his attention away from her. “I am tired from the road. Perhaps you can get us more wine?”

She should keep her eyes on him, to be sure. But her eyelids are heavy. Too heavy to keep open. 

Jaime stands up and she can hear him setting her wine glass upright. She means to open her eyes again, but it feels so good to keep them closed. She will find the strength to go on, if she can just rest here a few moments.

Then she hears his footsteps approaching, and Jaime is holding a key. They will have a room for the night, he tells her. The inn is upstairs. 

This alarms her sufficiently to jolt her awake. She jerks her head towards him, eyes wide. “We cannot. The Hound awaits us, and I said I would return with you tonight.” To her horror, her voice cracks over her protest.

“You are not going anywhere tonight,” he says quite firmly. “I doubt very much you could sit your horse right now.”

“Of course I can,” she insists. But the room wobbles when she rises to her feet. It tips and nearly throws her sideways, and she has to drop back down into her chair, startled. 

“As I said.” Jaime lifts her left arm over his shoulder. “If you collapse in the road I certainly won’t carry you back here. Up on your feet.”

Brienne has no energy to argue. She has no energy at all.

The thinking part of her mind is saying _no no no no no, we can’t stop here, it’s too dangerous, they will take us unawares and I will not be able to protect you._ But she cannot make her tongue explain it; he hauls her up and out of her seat.

Like a sleepwalker, Brienne shuffles where he leads her. Out of the tavern and to the stairs. The stairs are a league long. Climbing them takes an age. She needs a deep breath before each step and a rest after, and she refuses to lean on him when she does it, afraid she will knock him over. Brienne is too large to put her weight on someone. She uses him only for balance, though he keeps a tight hold around her waist.

She does not deserve his help.

A hundred years later she is in a room, stumbling to a bed. There are surely other things in the rented room but none so wonderful as that. She knows already she will not be able to resist lying down on it. 

“Lock the door,” she demands, sinking down onto the straw mattress. “Bar it.”

Jaime agrees distractedly, drawing back the covers for her. Stubbornly, she urges him all the more, raising her voice until he walks back to the door and checks that it is truly locked. Only then does she lie down on her back on top of the blankets and close her eyes and almost immediately float away.

When she opens her eyes, Jaime is pacing around the little room. He puts a hand to his forehead and rakes it back through his golden hair, muttering to himself. Some worry is making the very air around him vibrate. 

Brienne lifts her head only momentarily to look at herself. Someone’s taken her boots off, and her cloak, and the sharpest bits of her armor. She has no memory of that. She must have slept very deeply.

Blinking up the ceiling, she is again consumed by her misgivings. Now she’s alone with him. Her stomach clenches with dread. Jaime’s going to see right through her. She has no talent for subterfuge. And what will he do when he knows she has betrayed him to the Brotherhood? She deserves whatever comes of that, but what about Pod, and Ser Hyle? 

These thoughts chase around one another and grow foggy, and Brienne sinks slowly into a mire of guilt and regret. 

She rouses again as Jaime is putting on his own traveling cloak and hat. From the guilty way he looks over at her, she can tell he is trying to be quiet. 

“Where… what?” She has to force the words out in a croak.

“I’m going to find a Maester.” His tone is light and false. Hastily he ties off his cloak with one hand.

“No,” she says quickly. “You musn’t go out.” 

Her voice is foggy to her, strange and slurred. He stares back at her, clearly with no intention of listening. 

Then she is trying to sit up, and he is beside her immediately, trying to prevent her. Holding her shoulders.

“Brienne. You have a high fever, and it’s growing worse. I’ve never felt skin so hot that wasn’t over a cookfire.”

“It’s nothing,” she insists, pushing weakly against his arms. “It passes.”

“It passes?” He repeats it with some alarm. “How long have you been ill?”

 _Not long,_ she tries to say, but she has to catch her breath instead.

“I’ll not have you expire and leave me here alone in the Riverlands, wench.” His voice is strained, strange. “I’ll leave only long enough to locate a Maester and bring him back here.”

“I’ll follow,” she says stubbornly, swinging her legs clumsily over the side of the bed. “I will not let you go out without me. If I have to crawl on hands and knees I will.”

He lets go of her, cursing, and kicks over something that crashes noisily to the floor.

Not until he takes off his boots, muttering angrily about stubborn wenches, will she lay back on the bed and close her eyes again. She opens them periodically, to check his boots are still there. He cannot go anywhere without his boots. 

Or at least, she thinks so. It works for a little while. She looks at his boots, and hears him pacing still from one end of the room to the other. Until a new noise awakens her. The sound of water. She lifts her head (it’s so heavy) and someone is filling a metal tub with water (where did that come from?) and Jaime is nowhere to be seen, even though his boots are still standing where he left them.

She moans, forcing herself up, and a young maid looks quite alarmed. “Milady, don’t -- my lord, she is awake!”

Jaime rushes back into the room, barefoot and carrying a pail of his own. He drops it to the floor and it makes an angry clunk and a splash. “You said no maester, and I’ve followed your direction. But you are going to have a bath.”

“A bath?” She blinks back at him, confused. 

“A cold bath. They did it for Tommen when he was ill, to cool him. And your young ones, right?” He gestures to the young maid, but before she can speak up he is rushing on, his arm dropping. “It will bring down your fever.”

“I don’t need a bath,” she sputters at the both of them. “I’m not a child.”

Jaime crosses his arms in front of him. If he had a sword, he would point it at her in challenge. “Either a bath or a Maester. Choose one.”

Brienne falls back on her elbows helplessly. It’s no choice at all. She has to keep Jaime within her sights. She chooses the bath.

They finish filling the tub. Even curled up protectively in the bed, her head pushed into the pillow, the sound of water fills her ears. Humiliation builds within her, shaking her with the chills. She should not need this. She should not be so weak. A beautiful maiden can be fragile and sickly, but a brute with a sword has to be strong. The shame of it gathers behind her eyes and she must focus with all her might not to cry, taking sharp, quick breaths to steady herself.

The maid spreads implements next to the tub, speaking quietly with Jaime. He thanks her, and she retreats from the room, closing the door behind her.

Momentarily she hopes that they have left her alone, sighing aloud. But when she turns her head Jaime is standing over her. His hand opens and closes at his side.

“The maid tells me they can send for the maester in the morning, but until then we must keep your fever down.”

Jaime reaches down to grasp her chestpiece.

Brienne stiffens. “What are you doing?”

“I have to undress you,” he says matter-of-factly. 

She must look outraged. He releases her immediately.

Brienne fights to keep her voice level. “You can wait in the hall. I’ll --” 

“Fall directly on the floor?” Jaime glares at her in a manner that makes her want to curl up into a ball again. “Don’t be so stubborn. By the time you got everything off you’ll be passed out again, and you need this off now.”

_Don’t cry. Don’t cry._

She fights the tears back. “Does it have to be you undressing me? It’s indecent!”

His mouth takes on a cruel twist. “Would you rather the inkeep, or the maid? Or shall I flag down a strange man in the tavern?”

No, she would not rather that. But she cringes in real pain at the thought of Jaime undressing her. It would be a cruel parody of her secret desires, unbearable.

“I’ve seen it all before, remember?” he adds. “We have both been quite…familiar.”

Yes, that is true. She had bathed him at Harrenhall, and she had been naked herself then. She had stood bare before him in anger. But that had been different. She would rather fight the Brave Companions again than have him look on her now. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. She is giving him a headache. 

“Just… let me do something for you. Brienne. Just this once.”

_But you have already done too much._

She falters at the faint plea in his request. Perhaps she is being foolishly stubborn. After all, it is surely no different for him than to help a fellow knight remove their armor. Soldiers at war will do this for one another, and it means nothing more than brotherhood. 

Really there is little choice. She hasn’t the strength to fight, and he is determined. “Fine,” she relents, and lies back on the bed, turning to her other side so that he can reach the clasps on her back. 

Jaime goes about removing the rest of her armor with fierce concentration, frowning over the fastenings.

“On the other hand,” he mutters, “the inkeep might manage these buckles faster.” His left hand moves quite cleverly now, but the stays and ties and buckles of battle armor were meant to be maneuvered with two hands, at least. She assists him in some places, holding something down while he works at it. Between them he manages to pull off the pieces one by one.

Then she is back on her back and down to her undershirt and trousers, and it does feel better, in fact, getting those layers off. The air feels pleasant against her skin. But now he is getting down to her bare flesh, and she grows more and more tense as more and more of her is revealed.

As he removes her clothing Jaime also seems to grow agitated. He pulls up her shirt and makes a startled noise at her abdomen, nostrils flaring. She has to avert her eyes as he takes down her trousers. 

She can tell he is gritting his teeth and it pains her. It must disgust him, to look upon her like this, having to touch her body. Her a woman, and not quite a woman. A failed woman. Badly formed, brutish and grotesque. Disfigured too, on top of it.

When she peeks at his face his mouth is turned in an angry grimace.

“Who has done this to you?” he demands, seething, when he sees her eyes open.

She glances down at her naked body. She is marked nearly from head to toe with wounds, her skin nearly purple in places where bones have broken and mended and broken again. Her broken arm looks especially bad, her ribs nearly so. It is actually a fair sight better than it had been a few days ago, but it does not seem helpful to mention it.

Perhaps he is not angry with her, then. He is most certainly angry though. With an icy expression, he presses, “Was it the Hound? I’ll peel his rotten face from his skull.”

“No, it was not he.” She has not met the Hound, in fact. “These wounds are from...other men.”

He laughs, but not in a way that suggests she has said something funny. 

“More than one?” 

“Seven. For the worst of the fighting.”

“Oh. Only seven?” He laughs again, but he looks just as angry as before.

“It was enough,” she murmurs tiredly.

He shakes his head. Then he tells her to hold on to him and without warning lifts her into his arms. 

She turns her face into his shirt out of horror. She is too heavy, too large to be carried. He will surely show the strain in his face or even stagger, and she cannot bear it. It is a feature of her worst nightmares, handsome men collapsing to the ground when they try to lift her. Only tiny, pretty girls with thin wrists and slim, birdlike legs can be carried like this. Real girls.

Fortunately it is not far to the tub, and she does not notice any straining. She only hears him murmur, “You have grown so thin.”

Then, she is being lowered into the tub, and she cannot think of anything else but how freezing cold it is. The water, the tub surface, even the air around her is so cold it hurts. It feels like every muscle in her body tenses at the chill of it.

“Too cold,” she struggles to say through gritted teeth. She would have climbed out herself, but he is holding her fast in the bath.

“It’s supposed to be cold,” Jaime says through teeth gritted for an entirely different reason. “That’s the point of it.”

 _I might as well roll in the snow naked_ , she would reply, if her teeth were not chattering so hard, and perhaps she shouldn’t say as much anyway. It could give him ideas. Instead she sits in a few inches of icy bathwater with her knees pulled up to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs and tries to stop shaking.

She whimpers quite pathetically when he pours the first bucket of ice-cold water over her head. 

“The great warrior Brienne,” Jaime says sarcastically, and yanks her back down when she tries to rise. “No, don’t stand up, you have to sit in it. Good gods, you’re worse than a child. I’ll bet the children were better behaved.”

She hides her face against her knees miserably. She has never been so cold in her life; she’s sure of it. 

“It’s the chills,” he explains, as though he can hear her thoughts. “You’re still far too warm. Lie back, try to relax.”

Relax? Certainly, nothing more relaxing than lying naked in front of Jaime Lannister while he torments her with freezing cold water and his stupid handsome face. What could be more comfortable?

Jaime sighs and intervenes. He manages to slowly uncurl her from her tense crouch and coax her into leaning back against the chilly lip of the tub. 

Then he is busying himself with soap and a sponge, trying to rub the one against the other to make a lather. He has to trap the sponge against his fake hand and hold on to the soap. But the soap drops into the freezing bathwater and immediately slides under her legs, and soon after comes his hand chasing it. She startles at the unexpected contact of his hand against her thigh and quickly pulls away. The bathwater sloshes noisily. Jaime swears, fumbles, comes up with the soap and his arm is dripping wet all down his sleeve.

He glares between her and the soap, and his shoulders sag. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” he mutters, sounding frustrated. 

Brienne closes her eyes and tries to think about warm things to stop herself shaking. Furs. Sunshine. Fires. The campfire where she had slept so many nights in fever, a prisoner of the brotherhood. No, don’t think of that. 

She opens her eyes again and slides down a little in the tub, so that its metal walls enclose her completely. In her fever they look safe, like the walls of a fort protecting her. But she is left staring at her too-long limbs that have to fold awkwardly to fit inside, and will not all sit beneath the bathwater even as the water rises. Her knees will stick out, and much of her torso. She’s too big for this tub. Too big for everything. Big Brienne. Brienne the Beauty. 

All exposed in front of Jaime Lannister. She would burn with shame, if she had the warmth for it. 

He’s got the sponge ready now, or else he’s given up on the soap. He sits beside the tub now and she can hear the sound of water, and then he is running the sponge up and down her legs, starting with her knobby knees and down to her feet. Up and down. Not hard enough to scrub, really only wetting her skin.

She can’t look at him looking at her ugly body. She squeezes her eyes shut again. Hot tea. A hot water bottle. Blankets.

“You have seen battle now,” Jaime says, his voice quite near to her. “Several times. You have the scars for it.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. She knows she has gotten even uglier since last he saw her.

“I know these scars,” he says. He passes the sponge over the marks along her collarbone. “I saw these new. This was the bear at Harrenhal.”

“Yes.” She shakes with the chills, shifts, cannot hold still. 

“And this one.” He runs the sponge delicately along her thigh. “I made this scar, when we crossed swords on the road to Duskendale.”

“When I beat you,” she adds through chattering teeth.

He laughs at that, a genuine laugh. “After I’d sat in a cage for a year, with my hands chained together - yes, wench, you defeated me.”

He sounds more amused than bitter about it.

“But tell me of this scar, I do not know it.”

He presses lightly against her upper arm, at a fading mark. 

That one is easy enough. “The melee. At Bitterbridge. Most gave me no trouble. But the Knight of the Flowers. He managed to cut me once.”

“But you beat him.”

She actually smiles a little bit at the memory. “Won the melee.”

“Well done. Sword?”

An especially fierce chill runs through her, and for a moment she cannot speak. “M--morningstar.”

He laughs again. “I should like to have seen you thrashing Ser Loras with a morningstar. But what of this?”

He brushes the sponge over a fading bruise over her belly.

She searches for the words. “Ambushed at Crackclaw Point. One of us was killed. I took this blow. Through my armor.”

“Your attackers?”

“Killed them. All of them.” She does not like to think on that. Shagwell’s horrible laughter. Oathkeeper dripping with Pyg and Timeon’s blood. _Send me back to Dorne, you bloody bitch._

"Good." Jaime sounds grimly satisfied with her answer. “And this?”

He straightens her arm slowly from where she has been cradling it against her. Her forearm is shattered, swollen and misshapen. She gasps; it hurts something terrible. 

He only drips water over it, barely brushing it with the sponge. Even this pains her.

“The Inn at the Crossroads. Some of the Brave Companions were there. Rorge was there. He's dead now.”

He stops his ministrations and focuses on her face. “Those were the seven? How many fought with you?”

“Only me.” Stepping out into the rain alone, certain that she was about to die. 

The time he is definitely angry with her, specifically. “You took on seven men alone? Are you mad?”

“I was desperate. The children, the girls. Orphans. I had to protect them.”

What has become of them now? She couldn’t save them. She is a poor knight.

He moves her arm carefully back. “And what about your face?” 

She tenses. “It happened there too.”

He unwraps the bandage around her face slowly. The wound stings in the open air, and the broken bones in her face throb. He sets about cleaning out the wound, dabbing at it carefully. Every part of her cringes, knowing how it must look to him.

He is so careful. She can see his full attention on her wounds, and she has never seen Jaime so focused. Excepting, on further thought, when they had fought at Bitterbridge. Maybe only swordfighting brings this out in him. He is so casual and unconcerned most of the time, but there is intensity smoldering within him. She’s seen it twice now.

Tears prick her eyes suddenly, and she has to close them again. She doesn’t deserve this. Any of this. Not from anyone, and certainly not from the man she is leading to his doom. 

He brushes her hair back from her face, and it feels wonderful and horrible all at once.

“You told me this was a bite.”

“It was.” 

He winces. “I thought you must mean a dog or some other wild creature. One of those men bit you?”

Bit, chewed, and swallowed. The man they called Biter. He had held her down and torn the meat from her cheek like gristle off a turkey leg and eaten it. He would have kept on eating her if Gendry had not put a spear through his head. Sometimes she thinks of that, where his next bite would have been. She reminds herself daily that he is dead and buried.

“Brienne.” Jaime drops the sponge and grasps her shoulder. “Breathe.”

She is shaking so violently the water splashes around her. 

“Deep breaths.” He brings her forward until she is hunched over again, hugging her knees. “That’s enough. You don’t have to speak of it.”

She stays like that for a while. Hugging herself protectively, shivering in the bath.

Jaime lets her be for a little while. She knows he is there, sitting silently next to the tub. He is quiet for a long while. Then he takes up the sponge again and washes her back in lazy circles. Pours water over her, over her head. Then he is rubbing soap into her hair.

That feels...nice. His hand in her hair, massaging in slow strokes across her head. His fingers in her scalp, brushing against the shell of her ear, send tendrils of pleasure drifting down through her body. It’s like he’s combing the tension out of her. 

Cool water drips down across her skin, and her tremors are subsiding, slowly.

She cannot remember someone washing her hair. Not even as a girl. She had no mother, and her Septa said she was too big to need help from an adult. She can still hear her brittle voice as she shut her in the bath alone. "You had best learn to fend for yourself, unfortunate child."

Her eyes drift shut at the unfamiliar sensations. For a few minutes she is just a body, just a physical sensation, and that isn’t so bad. It feels very much like being loved, or what she imagines that must feel like. It feels like floating on a warm, tender sea. 

Jaime pours more water over her head and brushes the hair back from her face again. “I think that’s better. You aren’t nearly so hot to touch. How do you feel?”

“Better,” she agrees. 

Jaime lifts her from the tub and does not bother with a towel. By the time he has carried her to the bed he is as wet as she is, and he sets her down directly on the blankets. They will be wet too. 

It feels good to lie down again. She is so tired. She hadn’t even done any of the work and still the bath fatigued her. How long until morning? They will have to rise before dawn to evade their pursuers. If she can rise at all. 

Jaime hovers over her. He needs to be doing something but he’s not sure what. His hand floats just over her, blindly wanting. Then he turns around and busies himself tidying up the bath, from the sound of it. Her eyes drift closed and she dozes with the comforting sounds of his movements calming her.

When she wakes, he is bandaging her wounds. Slowly, one-handed, sometimes biting off the end of a bandage with his teeth, grumbling to himself. He bandages even wounds that have scarred over, treating them delicately. Her arm he splints carefully, a battlefield patch job but one that will probably serve her better than hiding her broken arm in her coat. 

He bandages her face last, working carefully around the broken bones, the torn skin. “I’m sure this is where your fever comes from,” he says. “It’s corrupted. We should scour it, like Qyburn scoured my arm. It will hurt like a bastard, but it did ease the sickness. Perhaps a bottle of stiff drink from the inkeep will do the job, until we find a maester.”

Brienne doesn’t like the sound of that. Thoros tended her wound at the Brotherhood’s camp, and the fever had broken. If it has returned, something did not work. But she cannot recall just what he had done to her face, and what he had not. She had been very ill then. 

Then she shifts with the creaking of the bed as Jaime lies down beside her. 

She’s still naked. This is quite improper. As a reflex, she pops up on her elbows, her eyes wide.

He laughs at her. “Relax, woman, I am not going to ravish you. There are hours still until daylight, and we both need the rest. Here.”

He tugs a blanket over the both of them, and arranges it across her lap, to give her some modicum of modesty, arranging it so her arms and legs are uncovered. She lies back onto his arm. The maimed arm, the one without a hand, lies behind her head, in place of a pillow.

Her face is turned up to the ceiling. But he is so close now. His face is just beside hers, and his body stretches out all alongside hers, almost touching. His left hand wanders. 

“Tell me about this,” he says. He is touching the mark around her throat.

“I can’t.” 

He hesitates.

“Answer for me then. Was it the Brave Companions?”

“No,” she whispers. He isn’t going to guess. 

“And it wasn’t the Hound?”

“I never met the Hound.”

“So you lied.”

“Yes.” A tear runs down her cheek. This one she couldn’t stop. “Forgive me,” she whispers.

“You silly girl.” He brushes at her face with his left hand. “You are the worst liar in the seven kingdoms; I never believed you for a moment.”

He never…but then why would he come? 

Her last defenses crumble.

She has no strength left. No armor, no walls. She is naked and wrapped in his arms, and she cannot hide from him any longer.

“I betrayed you,” she whispers, and her tears begin to fall freely. “I agreed to bring you for capture. I did not know what else to do. I know they must be awaiting us outside, and I was going to protect you but I can’t.”

“You didn’t want me to go for the Maester,” he agrees in a low voice. There is something hard in his expression, a rueful twist to his lips. He catches another tear with his finger. “You won’t let me out of your sight. Someone has been following us?”

“Yes.” 

She cannot read his face. He is unhappy, but not angry. Not yet.

“Tell me everything,” he commands. “Start from the very beginning, and this time leave nothing out.”

She does.

It takes much of the night to give him the entire story. She is still weak. She drifts in and out of sleep, and takes up her tale again in whispers.

She speaks of the fight at the Whispers, where she had silenced Shagwell and cut off Timeon’s hand, and buried Nimble Dick.

Commander Tarly. The hedge knights along the Rosby road. The Quiet Isle, Septon Meribald and Elder Brother. Ser Hyle and Podrick Payne. The Inn at the Crossroads. Rorge. Biter. Her illness and imprisonment by the Brotherhood without Banners. Lady Stoneheart.

Sword.

He listens without comment, his thumb caressing her face. When her tears fall, he brushes them away.

Her tale ends as she sees in his camp two spies from the Brotherhood, disguised amongst his soldiers. When they leave the Lannister camp together she hears distant hoofbeats, and assumes they are followed. She had ridden until she nearly dropped out of her saddle, until Jaime insisted that they stop and now they are trapped here. 

By now they have let the fire die, and most of the candles have burnt out. It has grown chilly and dim, and long shadows conceal the unfamiliar room from her. The few candles left burning beside the bed flicker warm light across them, and she sees him in flashes beside her.

It has been some time since Jaime said anything, and she goes still. Waiting. 

“You let them hang you,” he says at last.

“They were too many,” she whispers. “I could not fight them.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.” Jaime turns his head, looks up at the ceiling. “For a boy. You risked my life for a boy.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispers again, her throat thick with remorse. She would give anything to undo it. If she had found some sign of Sansa, gone the right way. If she had fought harder. If she had perished at the Crossroads. Perhaps then Ser Hyle and Pod would be free now, and Jaime would be safe.

He sounds thoughtful, doesn’t seem to hear her apology. ”If it had been you in the Tower at Winterfell, you would not have pushed a boy from a window for anything. You wouldn’t have asked it of me. You would jump yourself first.”

She doesn’t follow that. She forgets he has visited Winterfell with the Starks, and she has never been there. She is so tired, and they are in terrible danger, and Jaime will despise her now.

He turns back to her. She feels the ghostly touches at her cheek, soft and sweet. Some time later she realizes it is his lips, kissing her tears away.

“My brave knight,” she hears Jaime say, so softly she may have imagined it. There is another caress of his lips against her cheek. “For now we are safe. Sleep. I will keep watch,” he assures her. 

She’s not sure he understands what she has just told him. She betrayed him. She has put him in mortal danger, and she cannot protect him. 

She must have spoken it aloud, because he answers her. 

“Yes, I should be furious. Strange that I am not. I have been much more angry for a lot less cause.” Jaime turns his face away from her, looking pensively into the shadows. She watches him thinking for a long moment, holding her breath. “Perhaps I shall be angry later. But we have more immediate concerns, and you are unwell. For the moment we are locked in, and I paid the inkeep to direct anyone who asks after us to the room next door. Should they kick in the door we will have some advanced warning of their arrival.”

She looks at him quizzically. How did he know to do that? It must have been hours ago.

“I may be no Lann the Clever, but I’m no halfwit either. You were adamant that I not leave your sight, and you have been looking over your shoulder all day long. It was not difficult to figure there will be danger. Though I confess it is a bit more danger than I expected. ”

Brienne is overwhelmed with relief; it brings even more tears to her eyes. She had feared he would simply leave, disappear in a rage and leave her alone and unable to follow. Now he knows what danger is coming for them, and he is staying at her side. She would not have believed it possible. 

She bites her lip, hard. She has no right to ask even more of him. But she must.

“Podrick needs me,” she whispers. “I cannot simply run away. He needs my help, and he is only a boy. Hyle Hunt as well, the Brotherhood holds them both. They are counting on me. Will you…help me?”

“Well,” he says. He smiles a little bit, holding her gaze with quiet intensity. “I suppose I cannot refuse a maiden in distress. Mind you, we are probably surrounded, well outnumbered, and we have only two good arms between us. Our off-hands, at that. Not the best circumstances, but it shall make for a good song, at least. Only give me until morning, I will think of our play.”

She could weep with gratitude. Jaime is clever, he will think of something. He will try to help her. If he says it, it will be so. Not all maids are beautiful, but some knights are still gallant.

Jaime caresses the unbroken side of her face, and his body leans against hers all along her side. “Sleep, my lady. Tomorrow we fight.”

She has no right to any of this - these gentle touches, his caretaking. This beautiful man. She deserves no forgiveness for breaking faith with him. But right now, she so desperately needs it that she will accept it anyway. She will close her eyes and be bathed in his devotion until all of the wounds and sickness and nightmares fade and she is left alone in the safe circle of his arms. 


	4. Home

**"Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage." — Lao Tzu**

* * *

The Inns are few and far between these days, and those with a decent bathtub are even rarer. In the many years of warfare visited on Westeros, during the Long Winter, and during the conflicts afterwards, many such places were destroyed, or abandoned, or both. 

In the still-fragile Spring, Jamie and Brienne have been sleeping on the ground more often than not. In a barn, if they’re lucky, or in a wagon, sleeping in turns with the other keeping watch. When they find work they will get spare rooms in a Keep or someone’s home, until the trouble is managed and the brigands or beasts are driven away. Then it’s back to the road, and tents, and snow. It is the fate of hedge knights everywhere, no matter how illustrious. Knights of the Dawn they may be, but in these lean times even Lords and Ladies are scrounging for coin.

Every once in a while they do come across an Inn, one they are pleasantly surprised to find open and operating. There is a bed, and a fire, and some modicum of privacy. If there is coin enough and space for it, Podrick can have his own room. 

And tonight, for the first time in months, there is a bath. 

Jaime claims the tub gleefully, to bask in the hot water, and after much encouragement Brienne is persuaded to join him. She climbs into the tub gingerly, toeing the hot water, moving carefully around him to sit between his knees. She leans back against him, and Jaime slides his arms around her, and her head falls back on his shoulder, and though they have never done this before, it is as comfortable and familiar as if they had done it for years. 

Everything with Brienne comes easily, just like this. Once they’d gotten started, at least. Nothing about either of them is simple, and she is a stubborn ox of a woman who never listens to reason, but he knows her down to her bones, as she knows him. He knows what she will want and she knows what he will do and they move with each other in harmony. She never asks of him anything he would not happily do already. They bicker, but they don’t fight, and even an angry Brienne never screams or throws things or calls him names.

It makes Jaime uneasy at times, how easy this is. Could anything so uncomplicated be lasting? All of his lifelong relationships have been much more contentious. His last love affair had been tempestuous and risky, and did that mean those relations were stronger, more passionate, more real? Sometimes he wonders. 

And there are times, like right now, when Brienne pulls away from him, and he doesn’t know why. 

After a few blissful minutes relaxing in the steaming hot water, feeling the pleasant weight of her her strong body resting against him, Brienne suddenly sits forward, scoots away in the tub and starts to do her own washing with a distracted expression. All her tension sits in her shoulders; he can measure her mood by it. Her long back is stiff and straight before him. Her hair is tied up carelessly, piled atop her head in a blonde bramble. He wants to pull it all down, but he will wait and see what is troubling her first.

There is a quiet between them that has been lengthening for some time. He has felt it growing steadily over the past week, and is steeling himself for the inevitable. There is no point of conflict between them, and she has not had any complaints, and it makes him all the more watchful.

He has been thinking lately of the cliffs outside Casterly Rock. He had dived off them so fearlessly as a boy, hurling himself into the sea. It had been a long fall, one to make your stomach shiver uncontrollably, and ending in a powerful impact against the surface of the water, like a full-body slap. Then he would drag himself onto the beach and flop there in the sand, happily battered, before climbing the cliffs again for another go. He could spend entire afternoons doing that, in those Summer days.

Jaime has not been back to Casterly Rock in years. If he stood on those cliffs now, would they seem small, unexciting? Or would they be outrageously dangerous to him now? He has been having that feeling of standing at a great height with the urge to fall over the edge pulling at him strongly, even knowing as he does now that there are rocks in the shore, and a dozen ways to break himself there. 

Here, now, he thinks, Brienne is preparing to say something. He can feel it coming. Something momentous that is making her terribly nervous. He thinks she has been chewing on this for several days now, over meals and in their bed, without managing to get it out. It is very like Brienne to worry a thought in her head before she will speak it, but this is pronounced even for her.

What better place than a bath for a revelation between them? All their secrets seem to come out this way. If she is ending their journey, as he suspects she will, he has been preparing himself for that too. He is ready for it. He will be quiet a little longer, to draw her out. 

He drags his fingertips lightly up the column of her spine and sees her shiver. He knows what she likes. Light touches at first. Like she’s something delicate and not the strongest person he’s ever met. Like her gentle heart is spread on the surface of her skin for him to caress. He takes his time. He traces moisture up and down her back, connects her freckles like watery constellations. 

Water waves around him as he slides closer in the tub and presses his lips to the nape of her neck. He nuzzles the fine, downy hairs with his nose and presses kisses into the soft skin there; a secret spot he has discovered for the both of them. It never fails. Brienne makes the happy sort of hum that is the closest she will come to asking him for more, and her shoulders relax a little. He knows without looking that she is smiling now, despite herself. 

He has discovered this new kind of gratification with Brienne. These little things that make her smile, he files them away in his mind to use later. The secret purpose of his days, now that the Long Night is ended, is to please her. It does not take all that much. A flower plucked in passing, placed into her hair. Saddling her horse for her, so that she can sleep a little bit longer in the morning. These things brighten her countenance like sunshine. Even in these dark times, like magic, he can banish shadows away. Not forever, but for a while. 

In time she gently disentangles herself, turns around in the bath. Her shy smile still amuses him. They ought to be well past shyness now, but the bashfulness remains, endearingly, though in other ways she has grown much bolder.

She runs her soap over his chest, and uses both hands to spread the lather all across him shoulder to shoulder. Rinses him with water cupped in her hands. Places a kiss, delicately, over his heart. Then Brienne washes his left hand, which has become somewhat of a ritual for them. She likes to save him the trouble, and he likes to watch her careful attention to his only hand. She can get at all the bits that he struggles with, and massage the aching tendons in a way he can never do. She will squeeze each finger through the calluses from sword-play and press her thumb into his palm in slow circles. When Brienne is finished she brings his knuckles to her lips in a courtly kiss while his heart swells with affection for her.

There is still a slight tension around her eyes, but whenever she presses her lips to his skin he cannot help but think all will be well. 

Then she sits back at the other end of the tub, and takes a deep breath.

Here it comes, the thing she has been thinking on. The reason she has been distant and troubled.

Jaime is not at all prepared for what she actually says.

“I’m pregnant,” Brienne tells him.

It knocks him insensible for a moment, like a sharp blow to the head. Leaves him reeling.

“Are -- are you sure?” he manages to ask, after a befuddled pause. Brienne is inexperienced, young, perhaps she is jumping to conclusions. 

She responds with an even tone, not looking directly at him. “I’ve missed my courses twice now, and the Maester at Storm’s End agreed. I’m sure.”

Seven hells. That’s a bit more than a hunch. 

Jaime stares at her. She shows no obvious sign, and at the same time she is entirely different. He noticed her face filling in, subtly, but he had credited that to regaining her health after years of war rations and injury. Now it is clearly an entirely different cause. He can see now that her small breasts are slightly rounder, the nipples darkened slightly. How did he miss this? 

But she has been holding herself away from him for weeks, and in all that time he has not seen her naked in good light. All those times when he thought she was avoiding him, she was concealing this. Why had she hid it from him?

A low longing floods his senses. A child. Brienne’s child. A blond child with long legs and very blue eyes. A babe he might hold, and put to bed, and teach to fight someday. It is one of a few things that he has wanted so badly that he rarely thinks on it; a tender place in his heart. Brienne carrying his child.

Missed her courses twice -- and the jolly Maester he had seen her speaking to at the camp was a sennight ago. Which means…

Jaime sits up abruptly, water splashing around him. “You knew this in the Stormlands? Before we rode against the raiders?”

“Don’t start that.” She levels an exasperated glower at him. 

“You put yourself at risk!” 

“I did not. I fought well, didn’t I? This has nothing to do with my ability to hold a sword.”

He guffaws, unable to help himself. “It’s going to have everything to do with your ability to fit into armor and ride a horse, before long. You do understand that?”

“Oh, now you will worry over me.” Brienne wraps her arms around her knees, frowning, angling away from him. “When there’s nothing in my womb it matters not what injury I take, but now it matters.”

Jaime frowns. He always worries over her. Just because he doesn’t bother her about it doesn’t mean it isn’t so. 

“Surely you don’t intend to continue fighting until you are as round as a barrel? You will need rest and a Maester, should you birth a babe. If that is what you intend.” A pang of regret hits him as the words leave his lips.

Her voice goes uncharacteristically soft. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” 

Brienne looks so alone then, huddled in the tub between his legs, and miserable. It could still be undone, couldn’t it? Jamie cannot help wanting to end anything that would make her unhappy, and he has indisputably despoiled her. If her father were still alive, he would probably have his head for shaming his only child. Moon tea would get rid of a babe before it quickens, he knows. If she wishes to continue on her knightly way, she may prefer that. Seven hells, he thought he had been careful. He had finished with his hand, spilled onto her stomach, or she used her mouth…though there was that time in Duskendale when she had ridden him right over the edge, and the other time after that…damn, damn, damn.

He tries to pull her close again.

“I’m sorry,” he says quietly. “I’ve dishonored you. If you will want to put an end to it, I can find a way…I’ve done it before.”

Brienne goes stiff and unyielding against him. 

“No! ” They are both startled by how loudly she says it. She lowers her voice after that. “No. There’s no need for that. I…” She stumbles over her words a while. “What’s done is done. I will bear the child and raise it myself. Do not worry.”

Oh. 

But of course she would not want him near her child, would she?

He lets go of her and slides back to his end of the tub.

Brienne sighs, and squares her shoulders. “I know that your travels are not concluded, and I can hardly strap a baby to a horse and ride. You are a Knight of the Dawn and there are battles still to fight, and wrongs to be righted, and there are plenty of other companions for you to ride with. I would not ask you to give that up. Unless…” she grows quieter, and directs her voice down into the bathwater. “Unless you had thoughts of settling some place…where I might be nearby...”

Hints and insinuations. He thinks she is almost asking him something, but they are still dancing around it. 

It has always been like this. They never actually decided to ride together, they simply did so, once they had escaped the mess in the Riverlands. When they arrived at Winterfell they had roomed together out of necessity, or so they had said. He had turned to her in the night, and she had not pushed him away. The end of the world had come, and chastity had been a small concern in the face of that. After the Dawn they had traveled together one destination at a time - we will go to the Neck, to Riverrun, to the Stormlands, and so on. Not speaking of the nights tangled together in the sheets, or planning any day past tomorrow. 

He has the precarious sensation again of standing in a high place, dreading that the depths below will draw him unstoppably over the edge. Or is it actually an urge to jump, and soar through the open air into an unknown fate? It can be hard to tell the difference between fear and desire. 

Jamie closes his eyes and says what’s in his heart.

“It’s funny, I never thought I would see this day. But I have grown tired of war. It has been so many years of soldiering now, and I think I’ve bloody well seen the whole of it. There's nothing left to do. I’ve fought beasts and Others and dragons and men of all kinds and in the end they all die the same. Our opponents grow younger and younger, and I can’t tell one from another and it all seems a stupid waste, all this dying. It isn’t fun anymore. It may be a good time to stop.”

She breaks in, sounding surprised. “Jaime…I had no idea.”

He goes on, his voice tightening. “I love to watch you fight, but people trying to kill you I could do without. I could do without patching you up. Seeing what new scars you will have. Seeing you bleed. It grows tiresome. I’d much rather see you sleeping comfortably and growing fat.” 

“... I expect the growing fat is inevitable at this point,” Brienne says dryly. She has been too much around him; she is acquiring his sense of humor. 

But he is not to be distracted now. This next will be the riskiest venture. “I want to have a home. I want to have a bed that’s ours and sleep in it every night. And if there is a child…I’d like to hold her, at least once.”

She looks startled. “Of course you can. Of course.”

“I could sing to her. To put her to sleep. I’m an excellent singer.”

“You are a horrifying singer.” Brienne laughs, which is a rare and wondrous occasion. Then she asks cautiously: “Do you mean to say that you would… want there to be a child?” 

His heart thumps. He tries not to sound too eager. “Of course. So long as you do.”

“I do,” she says very softly. 

A sense of giddy lightness envelops him, like he has just leaped into the open air. 

Her face is almost hopeful too. Almost. “What about Pod?” Brienne asks, a touch fearfully.

“It's well past time to knight him, let him find a berth somewhere. I think he enjoyed Crakehall, and he seemed to get on well with Lord Roland, perhaps he would like to settle there.” Seeing her slightly downcast face, he hurries to add -- “You should be prepared, he may want to have his own adventures now that he's nearly grown. We ought to ask him what he wants. But if he likes, he could come with us. We could put him to work easily enough, and he’d be welcome. I would miss the lad if he left. I like having someone to spar with that I can beat.”

That brightens her expression a little. She comes a little nearer. “But where would we go? Tarth is a wreckage, and your sister is imprisoned at Casterly Rock…”

“Not there,” he agrees. “I don’t know where we would live, but does it matter? There are other Lannister holdings, or we could try to rebuild on Tarth. Or I could close my eyes and point to a map and wherever it lands, we settle there. Any four walls and a roof will do.”

Brienne is skeptical of that particular idea. “Of course it wouldn’t. You are a Lannister. You are accustomed to luxury.”

Jaime gestures with both arms at their surroundings, eyebrows arched. Another anonymous, run-down inn. Hardly a luxurious lifestyle that they are living. 

“You tolerate this now, but for good, forever? You cannot tell me you would be happy with that. We would be sleeping in tents on Tarth until Evenfall Hall can be rebuilt, if I can even find someone to help us -- it wouldn’t be a home.”

“It’s as I’ve always said.” Jaime reaches over to touch her face. “Anywhere you are will be home to me.”

Now it is Brienne’s turn to go still and startled.

“But you haven't. You’ve never said that.” He can hear the frown of consternation in her voice. 

“Oh?” He smiles. “I must have forgotten to.”

She exhales, sounding more relieved than annoyed. “You are impossible.”

He grins. Looks at her belly, thinking, there is a babe somewhere within. His freckled warrior, scarred and fearsome, will be a mother. What a mother she will be. A fierce, aching adoration washes over him at the thought. 

“Where should the child be born? I assume you would not want our daughter to be a Hill or a Rivers.”

“The child will be a Tarth,” she says firmly, “and it could be a son.”

“Daughter,” he insists, “and if she will be a Tarth, I suppose you have worked this out quite well. You have your family line continued all on your own, without the need to marry. I would call it a nefarious plot if I thought you had the foresight.”

“I had opportunities to marry,” she says patiently, “and I could have had several babes by now, if that were all that I wanted. I chose the sword instead, and then I chose you.”

The sensation of falling fills his stomach.

“Then marry me.”

Brienne stops short. “This conversation is making my head spin. What did you say?”

“Marry me. It’s cutting things a bit close, but it will be some time before your condition is obvious, and you’ll be a proper married woman before anyone thinks to count back on their fingers.”

“Then none of us will be Tarths. It defeats the purpose.” She’s still bantering, forcing a smile. She thinks he’s joking.

“If we live on Tarth, then we’ll all be ‘of Tarth’, I imagine. Jaime Lannister of Tarth is a mouthful, but a sweet one, don’t you think?” He takes her chin with his hand and turns her face back to him. “Marry me,” he says again, softly and seriously.

She gapes at him. Her blue eyes are welling up, brimming with tears. Her mouth opens and closes without a sound, once. Then she chokes out: “I suppose that’s practical.”

He kisses her.

The kiss tells him everything. Only the sense of her softening against him reveals how tense she had been. Brienne had been scared to death of what he would say, and now the tension is flowing out of her, draining into the bathwater. 

They are so terrible with words. His proposal sounded like a jest and her acceptance like a sigh of resignation, but that wasn’t the real question or the real answer. The real question is his hand holding the back of her neck and his arm tightening around her waist, and she is moving to answer him. Her lips against his say _yes_ . Her body turning into his says _yes_ . She straddles his hips in the bath and touches his face with both hands and kisses him urgently, and in no uncertain terms _yes, I will marry you, yes._

Their skin slides together in the still-steaming air, beneath the water, thighs and fingers and hips. Slick, hot, responsive. Anxious to touch each other, to communicate what is burning inside them. 

The tub is too small. They are large people and the water is sloshing over the side and there is nowhere to put all of their limbs as they wrap around each other. As one, they rise up and climb over the side and out of the bath, lips still telling each other _yes_ , _yes, yes._

They don’t make it to the bed. The need is too urgent. Her knees buckle, and he chases her hips to the hardwood floor and is pushing inside. The sound Brienne makes seems to burst out of her chest like a low, throaty song. She holds onto him so tightly it will leave marks.

There are so many things they never say. But Jaime says a lot of things when they’re like this, when he’s inside her. Words bubble up out of him without thought and at times he is startled at what comes out. The things he confesses. The things he promises her. 

She says things too. Rarely, sparingly, not in seduction. Something wrung out of her like a confession, like a secret.

This time there are no words sufficient. There are groans and cries and wordless pleas that only begin to convey their joy in each other, the elation they are sharing that is their bodies joined together. This is the promise they have made, again and again, that holds them bound to one another through terrible trials and uncertainty and doubt. This connection between them, at its purest and most powerful.

When they come back to themselves they are sprawled on the floor wet and disheveled and out of breath. They fumble their way over to the bed and slip beneath the covers, and almost immediately they are reaching for one another again. 

In the semi-dark beneath the blanket, some time later, they stop to gaze at one another. Brienne looks quietly jubilant. She is covering her face with her hands, her eyes shining. 

“Don’t hide yourself. I would look upon you.” He traces her smile with a finger when her hands fall away. “What’s that for?” 

Brienne actually blushes a little bit. “I believe we are betrothed.”

“I suppose so,” he confirms.

Jaime’s smiling too. He couldn’t stop if he tried.

He has gotten away with it somehow. He asked for exactly what he wanted more than anything, and she didn’t laugh and she didn’t rebuff him. Brienne actually agreed to it. She will become his wife, and will let him be a father to their child and they will be a family. And she looks incandescently happy for it, more than he has ever seen her. That is the crowning achievement, that it delights her so. 

“Do you suppose we can find a Septon at this time of night?” he cannot resist asking. 

Amused, Brienne caresses his face. “It cannot wait until morning?”

“I have already lived two-and-forty years without a wife, and that is quite enough, my sweet.” He turns his face and kisses her hand where it was resting against his cheek. “I would make you my wife right now, before the sun rises, if I could.”

“You really would have me for your wife? Truly?” A silent snort shakes her. Brienne clearly can’t quite believe it. She balances on the edge between tears and laughter. “A fighting companion, I can understand, but your lady wife? I am no lady, Ser.”

He has his own doubts. He is surprised to hear his own voice tremble as he speaks them. “And you, you would bear my child? And have all the world know I fathered it?”

She takes his hand, threads her fingers through his. Always she will want to reassure him, even through her own doubts. As always, it makes him braver.

“You’re my lady,” he assures her first. “And I will be proud to be your husband.”

Her smile widens. “If you will have me, then we will face the world together, you and I. And the babe, when she comes.”

“I would like that,” Jaime says, laughing in joyous disbelief, “I’d like nothing better.”

Jaime lets go of the idea of spending the next few hours hunting for a Septon, in favor of pulling Brienne on top of him in the lovely warm bed. After all, they should take advantage of the Inn, particularly while they do not have to worry about being careful. If he must wait a few hours to be wed, they will at least make them pleasant ones, and tomorrow, they will find the nearest Sept.

They will make a home together then. He likes the idea of building something new, something without the weight of history and inheritance upon it. Their own house, neither Lannister nor Tarth. It would be only theirs, and they can make what they want of it.

Right now his only requirement is that it must have a bath. A large bath, where Brienne will not worry that she is too big, where they can recline in it together with room to spare, and make love. Somewhere private and only for them, where secrets and fears can be washed away and wounds mended. He will bathe his wife when she is big with his child and she will tend him when he is old and decrepit. It will be only one way for them to take care of one another, but it will be their favorite. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to aliveanddrunkonsunlight for the opportunity to write this. The original prompts were:  
> *a post-Harrenhal bath scene. What happens when Jaime wakes up from passing out? Is Brienne there to care for him?  
> *a happy ending - how do you think Brienne and Jaime will end up in the books? What would have been a happy ending for them on the show? Would they go to Tarth? Stay at Winterfell? Travel on their own?
> 
> I'll visit the comments once the anonymity is lifted. Thanks for reading!


End file.
